Seeing Isn't Believing: Blindness, Race, and Cultural Literacy

Abstract

This article focuses on audio description (a technique used for “translating” visual material to aural readers/blind people) and its relation to the cultural construction of race in the United States. In it, I present exploratory research on audio description (AD) and raise important questions in the field of visual anthropology: how does one translate visual material for a non-seeing audience? From the point of view of blind consumers, what constitutes “good” description? What is culturally salient in the visual field? Is race important to describe? This paper presents the results of three telephone focus groups on AD, conducted in the USA in the fall of 2005. The focus groups involved thirty-nine blind or visually impaired people nationwide, who discussed (among other things) the need for race to be described. These participants argued for the need for race-based knowledge as an important part of cultural literacy, and, in so doing, raised questions about how visual race is.

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